Online Tool to Analyze COVID-19 Impacts on Food Security
As COVID-19 continues to touch nearly every aspect of our daily lives, the impacts that the virus is having on agriculture and food production are a primary concern given the global, interconnected nature of the food system. Thanks to the many advancements made in satellite technology particularly in recent years, today we have access to an expansive amount of remotely-sensed Earth observation data. This satellite data is critical in enabling experts to rapidly respond to the pressing need for free and open-use analytical tools, especially in the face of changes to policy, labor availability, logistics, and food prices brought on by COVID-19.
Analyzing the various factors that contribute to food insecurity can be difficult to meaningfully capture due to the sheer number of variables that impact food production and food markets. This is true even during times when researchers are able to travel freely for data collection, let alone during a global pandemic that has caused loss of life, business closures, financial hardship, restricted borders, and decreased access to nutritious food for many. Thus, a real need exists for easily-accessible tools that enable agricultural stakeholders to gain a comprehensive understanding of potential COVID-19 impacts as they relate to food availability.
In response to this need, researchers of the NASA Harvest Consortium -- NASA’s Food Security and Agriculture Program -- have been hard at work creating the new NASA Harvest COVID-19 Dashboard to help quantify the pandemic’s impact on agricultural production and food security around the world. Led by co-principal investigators Dr. Mike Humber and Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef and co-investigator Estefania Puricelli, head software developers John Keniston, Antonio Sanchez, and the NASA Harvest team have developed this publicly available web-based tool with end users in mind. The primary goal of the dashboard is to provide users with supply relevant chain information that will facilitate analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to crop production, market price volatility, food availability, and rapidly evolving policy changes.
The interactive dashboard is easy to navigate and provides academics, economists, citizen scientists, and any other interested analysts with access to a vast amount of agricultural-related data in the context of COVID-19. Uses for the dashboard range from comparing crop production on a national scale pre-dating the start of the pandemic to understanding the changing cost of commodity crops in agricultural markets over time. The dashboard allows users to search for datasets published by NASA Harvest partners as well as other datasets relevant to agricultural monitoring and food security. This tool can be freely accessed from any web browser and data can be downloaded, visualized, and analyzed from one convenient location.
Datasets that are currently integrated into the dashboard include:
COVID-19 Cases Overview and COVID-19 Regional Overview from John Hopkins University
Travel Restrictions by Logistics Cluster and WFP
Crop Condition Global Overview, Crop Conditions, and Crop Calendars from GEOGLAM Crop Monitor
Commodities Prices from the Food Security Portal and World Bank
Macroeconomic Data from The International Monetary Fund
Trade Matrix from FAO
Food Assistance from FAO
Food Security Index from The Economist Intelligence Unit
Acute Food Insecurity Classification from the IPC
*Email info@nasaharvest.org to collaborate or contribute additional data to the NASA Harvest COVID-19 Dashboard*
“Understanding global food systems in terms of production, logistics, economics, and policy is and always has been a challenge - COVID-19 has highlighted how important it is to really understand the relationships between these different facets of the agricultural supply chain and a big part of that is bringing together the data,” says PI and NASA Harvest Data Lead, Mike Humber.
In coordination with and support from the broader agricultural remote-sensing and Earth observations communities, the dashboard includes contributions from NASA Harvest partner organizations such as: the International Food Policy Institute Food Security Portal (IFPRI FSP), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the GEOGLAM Crop Monitors, and is backed by the use of open source COVID-19 datasets (i.e., Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 data provided by Esri). This work is funded under NASA’s Rapid Response and Novel Research in Earth Science (RRNES) Program which calls for projects that make innovative use of NASA satellite data to address environmental, economic, and societal impacts of the pandemic. Additional contributions to the development and execution of the Harvest COVID-19 Dashboard include a NASA Harvest team based at the University of Maryland: Christina Justice, Blake Munshell, Catherine Nakalembe, Dan O’Neill, Jack O’Bannon, and Mary Mitkish.
The team is currently accepting feedback and additional data contributions from those interested in collaborating. The Harvest COVID-19 Dashboard will be regularly updated and sustained through August 2021 under the NASA RRNES Program and will be regularly maintained beyond this date as a core NASA Harvest tool. Part of the NASA Harvest mission is to enable and advance the adoption of satellite Earth observations by public and private organizations to benefit food security, agriculture, and human and environmental resiliency in the U.S. and worldwide. This can best be accomplished through international collaboration, using the technology at hand to inform decision-making and policy implementation for societal good.
“The current pandemic is the latest episode highlighting the urgent need for a global, comprehensive, multi-disciplinary food supply-chain information system. The NASA Harvest COVID 19 dashboard provides a significant step towards fulfilling this need by bringing together a range of satellite-based crop indicators alongside real-time economic data, trade & price information, food security indicators and policy information. We look forward to feedback from the community and continuing to evolve and advance this tool for supporting assessments of the complex and rapidly evolving global food supply flows," says NASA Harvest Program Director, Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef.
Explore our Storymap to learn more about the NASA Harvest COVID-19 Dashboard and how to use it. Email info@nasaharvest.org if you would like to contribute data.